ADMIN

Recently, I was asked to automate the process of checking a set of known URLs and determining if each URL corresponded to a “live” site. For our purposes, a site is live if I can PING it and get a reply back.

I can open a command prompt and use the PING command and read the response to determine if a site is live. A live site would return a series of messages starting with “Reply from”, while a non-existent site would report an error.

Unfortunately it is difficult to automate this task from the command prompt. Fortunately, the .Net framework provides the tools to allow me to ping a URL with just a few lines of code. The functionality I need is in the System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace.

I have created a public class PingUtils and added the statement

using System.Net.NetworkInformation;

at the top of this class.

Next, I added the following method to attempt to ping a URL and return true, if successful.